This biopolitical body, used to undermine the French Revolution, had also been denounced earlier by Hannah Arendt in her essay On Revolution, if without using the new term. The social question and the formulation of a right to existence were in her view the inaugural forms of a politics in which the question of ‘life’, as she called it (Aristotle’s zoē, Agamben’s ‘bare life’), acquired full right in the field of politics, inaugurating a politics of pity. By denouncing social inequality between rich and poor, the revolutionaries, according to Arendt, destroyed the possibility of a politics based not on the principle of equality but rather on that of liberty. For her, in effect, what was at issue in politics was not life but the world. Liberty was a reality of the world that existed in a common space that men inserted themselves into by action and speech. Men are free when they act. For Arendt, the social question led the Revolution to produce men who, instead of being free and citizens, would be equals in the relationship established to material goods, and reduced – just as under the denounced Ancien Régime – to the state of a flock of animals. In this context of arithmetic equalization, no one would seek any more to act on the world, and all that mattered would be to maintain ‘the beautiful day of life’, as Aristotle put it.17 Contrary to what was asserted in the Declaration of Rights, they would be living men who did not manage to rise to the state of citizens.
For Arendt, the question of the blood spilled by the revolutionaries, of cruelty towards the political enemy, was bound up with the entry of the ‘unfortunate’ onto the stage in 1793–94: ‘Pity, seen as the wellspring of virtue, was claimed to possess a higher potential for cruelty than that of cruelty itself.’ Arendt cites the most radical of the revolutionaries, ‘Out of pity, out of love for humanity, be inhuman’, and she continues:
These words are the authentic language of passion, followed by the crude but none the less precise and very widespread justification of the cruelty of pity; the skilled and kindly surgeon uses his cruel and charitable knife to cut off the gangrened limb and thus save the body of the patient.18
In this way, the French Revolution becomes an intolerable historical event, one which injures a general present-day sensitivity by offering the archetype of a violence inflicted and assumed on the body of the enemy, and an imaginary of cruelty at once exceptional and unbounded, since it is legitimated in the minds of those who perform it by their sentiment of doing good.
Aversion to the French Revolution combines rejection of a politics of pity that produces political impotence with rejection of a politics of cruelty bound up with the passion for the unfortunate and the exercise of the sovereign exception. As Giorgio Agamben concludes:
until a completely new politics . . . no longer founded on the exceptio of bare life – is at hand . . . the ‘beautiful day’ of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it.19
These theoretical issues offer a further step towards understanding how aversion for the Republic can draw in the whole of the socio-political spectrum. It is no longer simply with respect to the supposed perfection of the present democratic model that the Revolution is intolerable, but also with respect to what the articulation of its legacy – modern sovereignty – and its inventiveness – the project of a just and happy society – have supposedly produced: political impotence.
In order to reopen these debates, it is necessary to return to the archives, to the nitty-gritty of the revolutionary political and philosophical project. A return to certain key moments of what is customarily known as the revolutionary dynamic will make it possible to cast a new light on the political and historical link between liberty, sovereignty and equality, and to offer a new interpretation.
EXPELLING DREAD: NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT THE TERROR
‘But what can have struck men so greatly that they kill their own kind, not with the amoral and unreflective act of the semi-animal barbarian who follows his instincts without knowing anything else, but under an impulse of conscious life, as creator of cultural forms?’20 This question was formulated in order to try to raise the veil over the mystery of rituals of sacrifice, and it is tempting to apply it to the period of the Terror.
In fact, this explicitly anthropological approach makes it possible to take a distance from any a priori judgement on the Terror, and to associate three terms that today have become unpronounceable together: ‘terror’, ‘culture’, and ‘impulse of creative life’. Such an inquiry will reopen the dossier on a cause that seems to be satisfactorily understood and closed – that of the reasons for the violence of the Terror. Rejecting the other, more implicit anthropology, which fuels the dominant historical discourse and steers it towards notions of impulses, barbarism and instinct, of the deadly tendency bound up with a ‘rigourism of virtue’,21 we might hope to resolve the question of foundational violence.22
If it is nothing new to analyze the Terror in terms of foundational violence, this very idea of foundation is always bound up with the struggle against the Ancien Régime and is never made any more specific.23 A violence of this kind, however, can be rehabilitated without considering it as directed specifically against the Ancien Régime. Various religious rituals commemorate times of foundation and symbolically handle the risks of violence bound up with a moment that combines the destruction and the construction of social ties, risks that can indeed lead to the demise of the community. It is these same risks that make it possible to understand and analyze the Terror as foundation. This very exercise, however, is not without its risks.
The first of these is to view the Terror as a resurgence of primitivism. Yet political anthropologists’ use of the primitive society/modern society opposition does not seem to me an adequate response.24 Drawing on the investigations of anthropologists cannot today lead to negating a society’s historicity. Founding is not a primitive act, though we can hypothesize that there are anthropological analogies in the act of foundation – whether this occurs in the fifth, the eighteenth or the twentieth century. It is also worth recalling here that eighteenth-century anthropology did not merely distinguish between primitive and modern peoples, but also between free peoples and slave peoples; yet ‘primitive’ does not coincide with ‘slave’, nor ‘modern’ with ‘free’. History was then often seen as a procedure of denaturing that led free peoples into slavery – thus adding to the critique of the ‘primitive society/modern society’ dichotomy.
The second risk is to propose an analysis in ‘theologico-political’ terms. One approach of this kind has already been radically criticized.25 The particular ‘theologico-political’ in question here is one that posited the power of religious principles, and Catholicism in particular, in order to interpret such secular revolutionary notions as ‘virtue’. Michel Vovelle emphasized the path taken towards secularism by the French revolutionaries, as opposed to the English revolutionaries who had still needed the Bible in order to act.26 It is true that the question of a sacred bond was far from absent from the revolutionaries’ concerns. To ‘re-bind’ (religare) men by sacred bonds was an important aspect of the revolutionary project of year II. But the question of foundation is not a theologico-political one. The notion of a ‘transfer of sacredness’, proposed by Mona Ozouf in order to explain the investment of a secular political sphere by people who were familiar with the imbrication of religious and political power, muddied the waters.27 The invention of a new sacred sphere, in fact, does not presuppose shifting the symbolic and emotional investments of religion towards politics, but rather of adding the two together by offering individuals a different site for their desires for community. Civic religion is another possible way of combining people. If this seemed necessary to the revolutionaries, it was not exclusive. The question, then, is to grasp what political sacrality, as foundation of a circulation of emotions, led to the violence of the Terror in the build-up to year II.28
I have chosen here the paradigm of e
motions, and not, as might have been expected for the eighteenth century, that of passions or moral sentiments. Despite not being contemporary with the Revolution, the notion of emotion has the advantage of highlighting an ‘upsurge’ that combines a state of the body and a judgement,29 i.e. feeling and judging at the same time. This was indeed what the protagonists of the Terror expected of a good revolutionary. Saint-Just, when depicting the events of 26 Germinal of year II, proposed a combination of mind and heart:
The man of revolution is merciless to the bad, but he is sensitive, he pursues the guilty in the tribunals and defends innocence, he speaks the truth so that it will instruct, and not so that it offends . . . His probity is not a delicacy of spirit but a quality of the heart. Honour the mind but base yourselves on the heart.30
Besides, approaching the Terror from the side of the emotions makes it possible to distinguish between the violence triggered by the circulation of discourse,31 and that triggered by the rupture of a conscious or unconscious sacred equilibrium. Patrice Gueniffey, borrowing the concept of a ‘cumulative radicalization of discourse’ from Hans Mommsen, who coined it in relation to National Socialism, maintains:
As soon as it is formulated, any definition of the Revolution is exposed to the competition of other definitions that deepen its nature and radicalize its objectives. In this lies the motor of that revolutionary dynamic which, escalating in the definition of ends and the choice of means, leads inexorably to violence by way of a process of cumulative radicalization of discourse.32
Far, however, from viewing the Terror as based on this kind of dynamic of narrative economy which aimed at the liquidation of an enemy to be overthrown, I shall put forward the hypothesis of a founding dynamic of emotional economy, one that arises from the sacred and from vengeance.33 In this context, the revolutionaries had both to understand the risks of violence and dislocation of society bound up with the rapid circulation of emotions, and to control these by the symbolic activity of which discourse is part – in particular, the discourse of law.
What put the Terror on the agenda, as we know, was a new declaratory turn. Faced with the intent of the counter-revolutionaries to terrorize the patriots, the latter replied: ‘Let us be terrible.’34 This turn has been interpreted in terms of a ‘terror-response’.35 Both of these combined terms are suggestive, as it was precisely a question of response, in the sense of finding a new voice after a sense of annihilation. Response is not like a simple rebound in which the ball is sent back across the net: it is rather a question of a resumption, in the sense in which a subject recovers and thus takes ‘the initiative of terror’.36 And the notion of emotional economy strikes me as particularly pertinent for analyzing the modalities of this resumption, since this return or resumption can be described not as a mere shift in utterance, but rather as a shift in emotions, from ‘being terrorized’ to ‘being in anger’ and ‘being terrifying’ – or more precisely, as a transcending of ‘agitation’ (émoi). This French word émoi derives from the earlier esmayer, meaning ‘to disturb, frighten, deprive someone of their strength, discourage’. This verb also means to take someone out of themselves by casting a spell. Émoi is therefore a generic figure of fright, and thus deadly. Far from presupposing an immediate response, it implies for those who feel it a high risk of demise.
The question, ‘How was Terror put on the agenda?’ should thus be replaced by the question, ‘How was the dread instilled in the revolutionaries by their enemies overcome and transformed into the demand for terror?’ And beyond this, how was this demand was understood and accepted? And finally, what did the Terror found, or seek to found?
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1
THE EMOTIONS IN THE
DEMAND FOR TERROR
* * *
SUBLIME DREAD: WELLSPRING OF THE SACRED
In the summer of 1793, the death of Marat aroused a feeling of dread in the people of Paris. This dread was initially sublimated in the form taken by Marat’s funeral ceremony, before being turned into a popular demand for vengeance and terror.1 Around Marat’s corpse, which represented the injured people and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, feelings of affliction and grief were transformed into enthusiasm. Spectators of the event moved from a palpable sense of discouragement to a feeling of enthusiasm towards ‘the spirit of Marat’. His burial was accompanied by the declaration that ‘Marat is not dead’. This proclaimed that the Revolution had not been destroyed, and would not be so. It then became possible to demand vengeance, and put terror on the agenda. This movement, which Jacques Guilhaumou describes in terms of the aesthetics of politics,2 involved not simply the disposition of bodies, the circulation of emotions and sentiments that inspired them, but also, as I see it, the relationship established to a sacred object.
In fact, if the bloodied body of Marat produced such disarray, it was because, by embodying the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, this was a sacred body, and its assassination a severe profanation. The question then was to re-establish the aura of sacredness around Marat’s decomposing body, which the funeral ceremony did by transposing sentiments from the body to the ‘spirit’, from the embodied meaning to the symbolized meaning of ‘Marat’. We could say, in the language of the Revolution, that this ceremony secured public safety by re-establishing the power of enthusiasm for right, in place of the affliction felt towards the dead body. Because the body was sacred, its death produced dread; but because this sacredness was based on a text proclaimed under the auspices of the Supreme Being, it could become a point of support for regaining the initiative.
(I use the notion of ‘sacred’ here without giving it a precise prior meaning. The composite definition given by anthropology, in fact, allows us to avoid fixing it in a single denotation, and in this way to introduce different aspects of it that are pertinent to the revolutionary period. Durkheim’s analytic definition, according to which the sacred is what is protected by prohibitions, seems essential to me in order to conceive the question of the boundary that if crossed makes someone an enemy, or the boundary to be re-established so as to avoid being destroyed by boundless dread. But the sacred in the sense of Hubert and Mauss, a transcendent reality that can be experienced, is also useful to grasp experiences such as funeral ceremonies. When this transcendence is nothing other than the society itself, and the sacred/profane opposition is combined with that of society/individual, this sacred can be given the name of ‘value’, as it is with Louis Dumont. We are then very close to the situation in the Revolution, where the sacred was essentially immanent.)
With the death of Marat, therefore, it was the transaction between sacred body and sacred text that made it possible to resist the enemies of the Revolution and to sublimate dread. This type of transaction recurs throughout the revolutionary period. It arises time and again whenever public safety is at stake, which is another way of saying, whenever dread risks dissolving the revolutionary social and political bond.
The notion of public safety runs right through the Revolution, and gives a name to a situation of extremity in which the safety of the people is the supreme law. Since this supreme law finds its theoretical foundation in the body of rules of natural right, its evocation serves to produce, around dread, the aura of the sacredness of right.3 But appealing to the sacred is not sufficient for public safety; it has also to be enacted. And enacting it always means engaging bodies to rescue right as the condition of liberty. Formulas such as ‘liberty or death’ have to be understood literally: they express a transaction that passes via the sacrifice of the body. The first oaths of the National Guard are quite explicit on this point. That taken in 1789 by the fédérés of the Guerche ran:
We, military citizens of the towns and countryside that form the district of the Guerche, swear on our arms and our honour to be loyal to the nation, the laws, and the king . . . to maintain the constitution with all our power, to be ever united in the closest friendship, to assemble at th
e first sign of common danger, to support one another and our brother fédérés on every occasion, to die if need be in order to defend liberty, the first right of man, and the sole foundation of the happiness of nations, and to regard as irreconcilable enemies of God, nature and man those who seek to undermine our rights and our liberty.4
From 1789 on, therefore, these oaths inscribed the definitions of friend and enemy in the order of the sacred. This enemy is irreconcilable because he infringes the sacred order, in which God, nature and men are very clearly associated. It was by affirming their determination to die to defend the laws and rights of the French that the fédérés considered themselves defending a sacred order. Each time that dread surged up, the question for the people was to save themselves by committing themselves in a sacred fashion, what could be called ‘body and soul’.
This same will to commitment is evident in the many addresses and petitions drawn up by the popular societies in May and June 1792, demanding a declaration that ‘the patrie is in danger’. The word patrie made it possible to name the place of liberty and laws. Saint-Just thus asserted: ‘Where there are no laws, there is no longer a patrie.’5 To ‘die for the laws’, then, became ‘to die for the endangered patrie’. Addresses, deputations and petitions, which expressed public opinion and transformed diffuse rumour into political assertion, declared that the ‘dread’ provoked not only by war but also by the treason of the king – and in particular his perjury, which was likewise a profanation of sacred rule – had to be countered. For example:
In Defence of the Terror Page 4